#10 [ENG] Galleria Vittorio Emanuele from Above

If visiting the Galleria is as natural as drinking a glass of water for the Milanese, for tourists it’s an essential stop on the city tour. Among all those eyes turned to the precious mosaic floor as to the mighty bulk of the dome, we could have seen Mario De Biasi’s eyes there so many times, too. In this 1954 photograph he portrays, as always from above, the central octagon of Milan’s salotto buono, or parlour. Yet there had been a time when all had seemed lost. On 13 August 1943, bombing reduced the Galleria to rubble. But the Milanese did not lose heart, even if the subsequent reconstruction was long and complex.Let’s listen to Maria Vittoria Baravelli.“Mario De Biasi felt the urgent need to convey a sense of re-appropriation of some places that had disappeared from everyday life for a time. He renews his love for the symbols of the city in his photographs, around which he catalysed a collective identity to be rebuilt.Milan has had two periods in which it was the centre of a renewal of society: between the 1950s and 60s with the economic boom, which was the period that De Biasi lived through, and in the early 20th century, the exalting years of Futurism. How can we fail to think, for example, of Umberto Boccioni’s famous 1910 painting Rissa in Galleria in the Pinacoteca di Brera? In his painting, an agitated crowd of characters creates the impression of generating movement in the air; it is the wind of change and regeneration, whose effects are still alive and present in De Biasi’s photograph.